Guilty Gear Xrd Sign Announced For Japanese Arcades

Sorry about the lack of stories for the past four days – it’s slowed down a bit. New games news almost never comes on a Sunday but for whatever reason Arc System Works decided to end the weekend/start the new week this way.

Fighting games still have plenty of traction in Japan (they would out West but are constantly undercut for various reasons we’ve gone into before) and for fans of the Guilty Gear series, this should prove interesting. Arc System Works has announced Guilty Gear Xrd Sign. The game will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company and will be released through Sega’s ALL.Net+ Multi game download network, which runs on the Ringedge 2. This does mean no collectible board for now (although that could change depending upon demand I imagine). At the moment the trailer just mentions its in development but they have made the jump to 3D graphics, although the quality of the cel-shading and other graphics here is good enough to maintain a 2D feel to it. No release date yet but I am sure we will know before too long.

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Would a board arcade release really be possible? Especially if the game is being built with Unreal technology. It makes a lot more sense come to think of it that the game will released in arcades for downlaod but what does that make for the US arcade scene/fans of the GG series???

Yes. It has been mostly forgotten but Blazblue Continuum Shift II was originally released through Taito’s NESiCAxLIVE service. But in May 2011 there was a small, mostly overlooked announcement that Taito created an offline board for it that even had an English translation:

I was actually aware of this fact! That is basically what got me to ask the question. Since BlazeBlue was built around Taito tech and Taito online distrbution outlets in japan, I assume the US offline boards produced are of the Taito Type X2 variation? Would it be safe to assume then if they did somehow see it lucrative to release an offline version of GG”Xrd” for the international markets outside Japan, that the board be of the latesest Sega arcade platform Ring Edge variety? And if so would the board be able to handle a production utilizing Unreal Tech?

Out of the entire announcement made, I’m honestly still quite shocked to see that the game is utilizing Unreal tech. Never thought ArcSys of all developers would be using it a for their flagship series… an arcade production moreso.